UK Newspaper Receives Call Just Before JFK Assassination

A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about "big news" in the United States minutes before President John F. Kennedy was shot, newly released files on the assassination say.

A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a memo from the CIA to the director of the FBI, dated Nov. 26, 1963, about a call received by the Cambridge News on Nov. 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said Friday that the paper has no record of the incident.

"We have nothing in our archive — we have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call," she said.

It's unclear whether the call was merely a prank and the timing coincidental. The CIA memo says that several people in Britain had received similar anonymous phone calls "of a strangely coincidental nature" over the preceding year, "particularly in connection with the case of Dr. Ward."

That is an apparent reference to osteopath Stephen Ward, a key figure in the "Profumo affair," a sex-and-espionage scandal that almost toppled the British government in 1963.